30+ Pure CSS Menu Tutorials For Web Developers

November 24th, 2010 Ntt.cc

CSS is an very useful and effective tool which help you separate the representation definitions of such structured documents as HTML, XHTML, XML from content. It opens the doors to a lot of powerful and rich opportunities such as create a whole new look, feel, and effect of sites.

This tutorial I will show you how to slice up the menu design (step by step) and put them together with CSS. Most of you probably know how to code a horizontal or vertical CSS list menu. Now let’s take it to the next level — code an advanced (un-typical) list menu utilizing the CSS position property.

What we want to do here, is instead of simply altering the state of the navigation item the user is currently rolling over, we want to alter the non navigation items as well. This will help focus the users attention on the item they have selected on, and create a new look and feel for the site overall. Want to see it in action? Look at my demo page before we start.

The question has been asked numerous times in the css forum, "Is a there way to create a css horizontal drop-down menu in css that will work on most browsers. Well… technically, the short answer is "No" if you are using just css, because IE is problematic in the way it handles css. However, the above is a DEMO of a horizontal drop-down menu that works

In this article we are going to make the toolbar below, using nothing but HTML and CSS. If it doesn’t look overly impressive, then you aren’t using Safari 4. I’ve not written this to show you something you can use in every browser today (though as we shall see it degrades gracefully in browsers that don’t support various CSS3 features), but to show what will soon be possible, and coming down the pipelines of CSS in real live browsers.

Here is a tiered CSS drop-down menu that works in IE 6, 7, and 8; Opera 9 and 10; Firefox 3.5.3.00; Flock 2.0 and 2.52; and Chrome 2.0.172.43 and 3.0.195.21 without hacks or javascripting and is accessible without using a mouse. One downside is that it still uses images for the tabs and the sub-menus are only one level.

This uses just CSS 2 to turn nested lists into a working menu and does not use any JavaScript (except in IE 5.5-6 on windows where I use the proprietary DHTML behaviours, because its CSS handling is not good enough to work this menu without script)

What in the world is a CSS Express Drop-Down menu? Simply stated, CSS Express Menus are a PVII solution that will help you produce a quick (express) CSS drop-down menu without some of the limitations found in some other "pure" CSS menus. What the heck is a pure CSS menu? Pure CSS menus use the hover pseudoclass, on the LI tag, to hide and show drop-down menus without JavaScript.

Are you looking to create navigation menus using CSS? Are you looking to use different styles for your navigation menus? This tutorial will teach you how to create different menu styles for a main menu, submenu, and footer menu.

In this tutorial you’re going to learn to create a simple, yet cool menu with overlapping tabs. I’ve kept it simple not because of the lack of time or inspiration, but in order for you to be able to improve on it and modify it in any way you need/want, both code and graphics. It should also be easy to understand its “inner workings”, as we will see during this tutorial.

This tutorial teaches how to build a css navigation using sprite images. With the mobile web becoming more important than ever before, load time and the size of a web site are some of the biggest factors to consider when developing a site for mobile users.

In this tutorial, we can learn how to create Mac-like multi-level dropdown menu that author’s created using border-radius, box-shadow, and text-shadow. It renders perfect on Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

In this tutorial however, no divs will be used, instead you will be forming a navigation bar using a unordered list. This tutorial will show you how to style and control lists in CSS, as well as showing you the valid ways of using lists and where to use them.

In this article I am trying to mimic the navigation menu in Dragon Interactive website using only CSS (no images, no JavaScript). Note: This is an experimental example using the new features of CSS3. The effects can be seen in Latest Webkit Browser only. Gradients works in Firefox 3.6 but not the fade-in and fade-out transition.

I am fascinated with how much you can do with so little using CSS3. Many user interface elements that require images in order to have appropriate visual appearance now can be styled only with CSS3. In order to prove that I assigned myself a task to create Windows 7 start menu only with CSS3 (and some icons).

The design of Digg is full of smart ideas. The site identity is strong but doesn’t take up too much valuable vertical space. Navigation is compacted with the use of simple drop-down menus. Important things like subscribing, searching and account information are right up top where you would expect them to be. It’s fluid width, but it doesn’t shrink too far or grow too big.

Follow these steps to build your own modern navigation bar design, starting with the initial steps in Photoshop to flesh out the design, then moving on to constructing the HTML and styling with the CSS image sprite technique. However, if all that sounds too strenuous, there’s also a handy download of the source files especially for you!

My friend William asked to me to design for his project a simple navigation bar with tabs using CSS.

I prepared for him this navbar (with status effects active, hover, link). You can download the source code and reuse it in your projects. If you want, you can change tabs colors simply modifying the image which I used as background for each tab.

This is a simple yet professional looking multi level side menu. Markup wise it’s just a regular nested UL list, turned into a drop down menu using a very small JavaScript code. Note that the menu’s background should be a solid color instead of a background image, as the later property is reserved to show the right arrow images that appear next to menu items with additional sub menus.

Today I wanted to share the easy method of creating a pure CSS horizontal navigation menu with you.You see a lot of sites using them and while some are very creative others are way off base as far as functionality and SEO is concerned.So without further ado let’s begin to create this horizontal navigation menu.

Today we are going to cover how to build a pure CSS menu with infinite sub menus; an area of CSS that is seldom talked about, poorly written or misconceived. This pure CSS menu with infinite sub menus technique makes use of CSS2 selectors so it will not work in IE6 and below without help from JavaScript. With that said, this pure CSS menu with infinite sub menus technique will work in:

Today we are going to build the second most common menu navigation, the vertical navigation menu. Here we are going to be using only pure CSS and un-ordered lists to create our vertical navigation menu with three levels of pop outs. This version of the vertical navigation menu will work in IE5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 as well as FF and Safari.

This tutorial will show you one of my favorite ways of doing a navigation menu with image rollovers done in CSS that uses only one image and very minimal HTML / CSS code. This is by no means the only way of going about it, nor is it the “right” way if there is such a thing, but I’ve found this to be a very quick and efficient way of accomplishing our task.

This article is the first of a 2 part series, and the second half will apply this tutorial into creating a CSS only dropdown menu navigation with the image rollovers that is compliant with IE6 and up.